75 pages • 2 hours read
Tae KellerWhen You Trap a Tiger
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 37-46Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 37 Summary
Lily feels an overwhelming sense of loss as her hope fades. Mom arrives at the noise and hugs her. Sam can’t move, and Lily vaguely wonders if she sees her as “A wild girl, maybe. Half tiger” (249). Halmoni comes up the stairs, pale and shaky, and falls.
Chapter 38 Summary
Mom calls 911 and goes in the ambulance with Halmoni when it arrives. She tells Lily and Sam to stay put. Sam worries Halmoni’s collapse is her fault, as she wanted their ordeal to be over. She then admits to sneaking out at night to scatter rice around the house and neighborhood, seeking to protect Halmoni. The girls decide to go to the hospital; Sam calls Jensen (who helped with the rice-scattering), but she doesn’t answer. Sam takes the keys to Mom’s car despite her fear, and she and Lily go out into a second rainstorm, “down and down, together” (254).
Chapter 39 Summary
Sam only gets as far as the road just beyond Halmoni’s driveway before she starts to shake and must park. She tells Lily that she struggles to keep their father’s memory alive, despite making a list of his traits and reciting it nightly. She admits to wanting to keep the list to herself: “Like, if I told you all those Dad-stories, they’d disappear. They wouldn’t be mine anymore” (257). Lily tells her that stories “are meant to be told” (257), and then proceeds to explain her tiger. Sam admits she’d like to believe in magic the way Lily does and promises to stand by her. Lily gets an idea.
Chapter 40 Summary
Lily deduces she’ll find the tigress at the library as she mentioned it being a favorite place. Lily crawls through a window despite Sam’s panic. Lily finds the tigress, apologizes for sending her away, and asks for her help; she agrees. Back in the car, Lily sees the tigress walk ahead. The rain doesn’t fall around her, allowing Sam to see clearly enough to drive. Sam can’t see the tigress, and Lily realizes that the older’s fear of not being a part of believing in Halmoni’s magic and traditions is why she “pushed it all away” (263). Lily hooks the pearl pendant around Sam’s neck for protection and instructs her to drive.
Chapter 41 Summary
A nurse leads Lily and Sam to Halmoni’s room where Mom cradles Halmoni on the bed. It is evident to Lily now that Halmoni is dying. Halmoni wants to talk to Sam first, so Mom and Lily leave the room. Mom thinks Lily is following her, but she instead goes in the opposite direction outside—where the tigress awaits. Lily tells her she can’t deal with so many emotions, wanting Halmoni to live but also wanting an end to her pain. The tigress explains that the tiger-mother learned that “you can be more than one thing. If you are strong, you can hold more than one truth in your heart” (267). She refers to Halmoni as “my Ae-Cha” when she tells Lily that while she promised to make her better, healing and recovering from illness are not the same thing. The tigress says understanding is healing, and that comes when “you face your whole story” (267). She says Lily inherently knows the third jar’s story, referring to it as the story of “our family.” Lily realizes the tigress is the spirit of her great-grandmother, Halmoni’s mother. To Lily, this means she too is a tiger-girl. Her great-grandmother implores her to create her own story, “the story of who you are yet to be” (267). A nurse arrives and tells Lily to return to Halmoni’s room right away.
Chapter 42 Summary
It’s Lily’s turn to speak with Halmoni alone. Halmoni confronts the tigers that scared her throughout her life (i.e., her English, her feelings of abandonment, her story). She realizes that the tigress (her mother) found her, and she wants to go to her. Lily hopes that Halmoni’s acceptance means she can heal, but she instead says she’s ready to die. Lily sees a fleeting image of a tiger on Halmoni’s face and understands what has to happen next. Mom and Sam return, and Halmoni asks to hear a story. Sam reaches out and pulls a star from the sky, then hands it to Lily to tell its story.
Chapter 43 Summary
In Lily’s story, a halmoni comes home to her two granddaughters, but they think she changed into a tiger. They “tried to change her back. Unya scattered the rice, and Eggi spilled the stars” (274), but she remained unchanged. The sky god who was part girl, part tiger (who left her baby in the hopes of saving her) sees the sisters. She sends a staircase and a rope for them to come to the sky. While the old sky god forced the tiger-mother to choose between her two halves by making a world where she was afraid to be both, the new sky god offers a world in which she and others can be “everything at once, fierce and kind, soft and strong” (274).
Lily pauses, considering different endings. Sam encourages her to keep going.
Up in the sky, the sky god (now a “sky tiger”) allows the girls to open their many star jars. The star jars hold love as well as stories sent from across the world—stories of the women in their family, “generations of women who’d fought for their hearts. Women who could be everything and anything” (275). The sky tiger invites the girls to tell their own stories; they tell tales of their halmoni, each one a new star for others to share and see.
Chapter 44 Summary
Lily tells Halmoni she loves her. Hours go by. Mom tells Lily that their stories let Halmoni know that “she was everything to us” (278). Sam clasps the pearl pendant between her and Lily’s hand. Lily whispers to Halmoni that they’ll be okay, and soon, Halmoni dies.
Chapter 45 Summary
At home, the basement floods, destroying the tiger trap. The family tries to get through each day, with Ricky texting often to cheer Lily up. After a week, he texts “rice cakes,” and Lily remembers the bake sale. The family makes rice cakes together, realizing that the event will be similar to a kosa. Mom tells the girls that Halmoni once worked to make the library a more inviting space as a special project. She isn’t sure how to make rice cakes and grieves never asking Halmoni, but Lily tells her, “Even if things aren’t perfect, they can still be good” (282).
Chapter 46 Summary
The bake sale turns into a kosa for Halmoni and many in town attend. Joe tells Lily that he knows she broke into the library, but doesn’t question it. Lily realizes that Sam and Jensen are in a romantic relationship. Ricky tells Lily he passed his test so they’ll be in the same class. Lily leaves the event to get some air, and Sam follows. They sit together, and Sam asks Lily to tell a story. Lily starts a new tale, appreciating that Halmoni gifted her with traits like courage that will help her in the future.
Chapters 37-46 Analysis
In Chapters 37-46, Lily realizes the star jars aren’t “real,” and as such, there is no real way to save Halmoni’s life. Her grief, fury, and helplessness tailspin after she destroys the last star jar, and for a moment, there is no reprieve. Sam leans against a wall in sadness, and Mom’s hug and sentiment of "It’s okay” (250) are ineffectual. To underscore Lily’s objective (saving her grandmother), Halmoni collapses and goes to the hospital. Mom’s tone and words convey that this is the end, and Sam finalizes that sentiment when she says their family is now “broken.”
But in their shared grief, the sisters start to make their way back to each other; they make admissions and speak more openly than they have in months or even years. From a narrative standpoint, Lily’s objective shifts from hopelessness to determination—to reaching the hospital. This is a somber and weighty goal to have, one just as important as her attempt to save Halmoni in the first place: They must reach Halmoni in time to say goodbye. Unlike Lily’s previous goal (one reliant on working alone and keeping secrets), she and Sam now share the same goal and are determined to work toward it together. This significance comes through in Lily’s symbolic reference to Unya and Eggi; unlike in the story where the two sisters came and went from the sky god’s kingdom separately, one on stairs and the other via a rope, Sam and Lily both “run down the stairs. Down and down, together” (254).
Once it’s clear that Sam must drive them (but can’t due to the rainy road that so terrifies her), Lily acts despite her own turmoil. She must break rules to get what they need, sneaking into the locked library. She must face her own mistakes and apologize for dismissing the tigress. She must encourage confidence in Sam; the older still can’t see the tigress but manages to drive thanks to her rain-free circle. Above all, Lily must demonstrate belief in magic and act on it. They arrive on time to tell one last story for Halmoni’s sake. The story Lily tells demonstrates how the tiger-mother and her daughter don’t have to choose either half of themselves; she accepts that life and its complexities don’t have to be only completely real or completely magical. Instead of making a choice, a blend of the two can be found, lived, and believed.
Lily’s story is an ode to Halmoni and the impact she made on her daughter and granddaughters. It also symbolically shows the revelation Lily experiences about life and relationships, forgiveness and family. She concludes the tigress’s first two stories with an understanding of sacrifice, the kind required of one generation of “strong women” to another. This ties into her realization that the tigress is the spirit of her great-grandmother, the mother who left Halmoni as a baby. Halmoni’s admission that tigers were after the stories she stole makes sense now; Lily understands that Halmoni was in the process of coming to peace with her mother’s abandonment and her own suppressed bitterness and fear. When the sisters release the star stories in Lily’s tale, their act symbolizes the release of secrets and conflict for the good of all. People learn from sadness and fear just as they do love and encouragement. As Lily tells Sam in the car, stories belong to everyone, so their lessons—whether easy or hard to hear—should be set free.
Rounding out Lily’s character arc, she steps firmly into a new role in her family as Halmoni passes away: that of storyteller. Just as importantly, she restores and rejuvenates her former role of sister, a comforting change in the wake of familial loss.
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